Crimes of the Century (2013) s01e06 Episode Script

1
She was young.
She was beautiful.
And she was in big trouble.
The 20-year-old from Seattle sits in
this Italian jail, a prime suspect
in the mysterious death
of her roommate.
This was "The Ugly American"
on steroids.
Is Amanda Knox
a whore or a saint?
I was sexually active.
I was not sexually deviant.
Was she guilty in fact,
or just in the press?
The newspapers had this fabulous story, assuming
that what the prosecution said was true.
It's salacious.
It's fascinating.
The juicier the tidbit,
the better.
It was a media spectacle that consumed
the United States, Italy, and England,
igniting controversy
that still rages.
There's something about the way her
eyes move that leaves us wondering.
I wished so much
that I had stood up to them.
The prosecution
of Amanda Knox, next.
Perugia, Italy,
Is a storybook city,
famous throughout the world for its chocolates
and equally famous to students as a party town
where getting high
and hooking up
is like a prerequisite
for the college experience.
To the average American tourist, this town
looks like an idyllic Italian mountain town
filled with beautiful art
and churches.
If you spend a little time there
and you read Italian,
you start to realize every single headline
is about drugs, it's about gang violence.
Everything looks so calm
and tranquil on the surface.
This was a lovely little hill town in Italy,
and terrible evil had been committed.
This was something that
the tabloids could feast on.
Amanda Knox never thought she'd
become fodder for the tabloids.
When she arrived in Perugia
in 2007
as a 20-year-old exchange student,
Italy seemed like a dream come true.
She was a junior at
the University of Washington.
She was good with languages, and she decided
she was gonna take her junior year abroad.
She enrolled at the Perugia School
for Foreigners, which is a school
that historically teaches
Italian to foreigners.
So, she became the third of four roommates
living together in this little house.
Two of the roommates
were Italian.
Amanda described one
as "offbeat"
and the other
as a "bit of a hippie."
The third housemate was 21-year-old Meredith
Kercher, a British exchange student.
Amanda found her "exotically
beautiful" and "friendly."
Next to Amanda, however, all
three seemed almost reserved.
Amanda is from Seattle.
She is was considered eccentric in Seattle,
which prides itself on its eccentricities.
The way that you comport and present
yourself to the people around you in Italy
is of extreme importance, but she
had this sort of extreme version
of being blithe and carefree and careless
and actually kind of took pride in it.
But in Italy, it's just not done,
and especially not young women.
As the newest and youngest of the roommates,
Amanda and Meredith found much in common.
They also shared a bathroom
at one end of the house.
They would only know each other
for six weeks.
It's just so sad.
She had
By all accounts as a wonderful person
a very smart, talented, and well-liked,
regarded, and loved girl.
Meredith Kercher
was more formal.
She was British.
She was more sophisticated.
She was there with a pack of friends who
she knew from the University of Leeds,
so she was
in a much more secure place.
Amanda was like a lone wolf running
around, basically picking up guys.
Amanda's free spirit and fresh-faced beauty
even helped her get a part-time job.
She was recruited to waitress at a bar
owned by an African immigrant to Italy
named Patrick Lumumba.
He hired her because
she was American and pretty,
and he hoped that she would
attract more male patrons.
The first big holiday of the season
was November 1, All Saints' Day.
In Italy, it's a sacred time when families honor
their ancestors, but for foreign students
like Amanda Knox and Meredith Kercher, it's a
traditional party time, not unlike Halloween.
Amanda and Meredith
had the cottage to themselves.
Their Italian roommates
were gone for the night.
Amanda had just started dating
Raffaele Sollecito,
a young student
whom she had met a week earlier.
Raffaele Sollecito was in love, but
how many people fall in love at 23
and think it's forever?
They met at a classical-music concert,
but those things weren't reported.
It was much more that she was this
wanton, kind of sex-crazed vixen.
For that one week,
they spent every night together.
It was a romantic whirlwind until
the morning of November 2, 2007.
After another evening with Raffaele, Amanda
returned to the house early in the morning.
She said she had no idea that Meredith
Kercher was dead in her bedroom.
Her throat had been slashed, and
she'd been sexually assaulted.
Amanda Knox came home the day after
the murder to take a shower.
She took the same shower every
single time she stayed at Raffaele's
'cause he had this really
crummy, guy-Type, moldy shower.
So she came home to shower
and change her clothes.
She came in and saw kind of weird little
things in different parts of the house,
but being Amanda Knox and being a bit
eccentric, she still took a shower.
She noticed, first of all, that there
were blood drops on the sink faucet,
and when she got out of the shower, a kind
of a bloody spot on the blue bath mat.
But she thought maybe Meredith was having
her period and had just dripped blood
or that the blood on the sink
had been dripped from her ear.
Amanda Knox had gotten
11 ear piercings that week.
She went into the other bathroom not
the bathroom that she uses all the time,
but the other bathroom to get a
hair dryer and blow-dry her hair.
At this point, Amanda's
story takes an odd turn.
There she found feces in the toilet,
which kind of grossed her out
because it was
a nice, clean house.
And those particular roommates that used that
toilet were the cleanest women in the house,
so she couldn't figure out why
didn't they flush the toilet
and thought it was really weird and
creepy, and she did not flush it.
Then she went back to
Raffaele's house for breakfast.
People found that
very hard to understand.
And, you know, the explanation is that she was
young and innocent and a little bit naive.
In her words, she was stupid about it,
but stupidity is not a criminal offense.
Amanda tries
calling Meredith several times
before she and Raffaele
return to the house.
In another odd twist, the police
arrive a short time later.
They're investigating the theft of two cellphones
that were registered to Amanda's roommates.
First thing they do is go inside and
notice Meredith's door is locked.
She doesn't answer the door.
They open the door of one of the other
roommates, and there's a room in utter disarray
with a broken window, broken glass everywhere,
clothes strewn around, drawers pulled open,
and clearly somebody
has been in their house.
And then everybody
starts to become concerned.
Meredith's door is locked.
No one is prepared for what
they find in Meredith's room.
The scene is a bloodbath.
She was lying on the floor covered by a
duvet, and her foot was sticking out,
and there was blood everywhere like,
on the walls, on the closet, everywhere.
The house was sealed off.
Amanda and Raffaele
remained outside.
Their behavior quickly drew
the attention of the police.
So, the body of Meredith Kercher had
just been discovered in the cottage,
and they were outside comforting each
other, and the cameras started rolling,
and they were not aware of that, and so they
kissed like these little pecks three times.
As the police gathered information, a lead
investigator was brought on to the case
Giuliano Mignini.
What people don't understand is that
a prosecutor like Giuliano Mignini
is both investigator and prosecutor, so
he's controlling what the police look at.
The devoutly Catholic Mignini was known
as a tough, no-nonsense prosecutor.
He is a staunch Catholic.
He believes that in his town, there are people
who are practicing these dark ritual acts,
and the fact that it happened
on All Souls' Night
was part of the clue, to him,
that this was a ritual act.
We used to say, "every day
is Halloween to Mignini."
Every day was Satanic.
Every day was witchcraft.
You know, every day, you had these
kinds of ritualistic overtones,
and that's what this overlay
was in the case.
Giuliano Mignini and the police
were not buying Amanda's story.
It was hazy at best.
Was there opportunity?
Yes.
But was there motive?
Giuliano Mignini is the kind of
person who can come to a crime scene
and see a beautiful English girl lying dead in
a pool of blood and fantasize a four-way orgy.
To Mignini, the primary
questions were obvious.
Did Meredith die at the hands of
Amanda Knox and her boyfriend?
And how?
As it turned out, the answers
almost didn't matter.
There's always been this idea that
there's just something more going on,
and people couldn't quite put their finger on it,
and Amanda was the best scapegoat, if you will.
Investigators have been picking apart this case,
bringing in forensic experts, criminologists.
For the press in both America and Italy,
it wasn't just the story of the year
it was the story of the century.
The Amanda Knox case had something for
everybody sex, drugs, international intrigue.
If you're the prosecutor,
it even had Satanism.
The Italian press crafted
a picture of this girl,
this American girl, that
was, "she's a sex maniac.
She's a spoiled, rich American.
And isn't she pretty?"
She had this uncanny ability
to look straight into a camera,
no matter who was taking
the picture in the paparazzi,
and look piercingly into that camera,
and the pictures were chilling.
I would much rather suppress my emotion than
have it be determined as insincere and affected.
A broken back window, an unlocked
front door, a mutilated corpse.
British exchange student Meredith
Kercher had been savagely killed
after a sexual assault
in her own bedroom.
The murder resonated
throughout Perugia.
As the days progressed,
and this crime became known to the
community, students were fleeing in fear.
"My God, there's a homicidal
maniac in our town."
Just outside the crime scene,
Meredith's roommate Amanda Knox
and her boyfriend of one week, Raffaele Sollecito,
were acting as if nothing had happened.
The police began to suspect they
were involved in the murder,
thanks in part
to the now-infamous kiss.
This was kiss caught on-camera, and then they
were accused of behaving inappropriately
in the context
of a murder investigation.
With her house now a crime scene,
Amanda moved in with Raffaele.
Police kept close tabs
on both of them.
Meanwhile, prosecutor Giuliano
Mignini developed a theory.
Raffaele was naive and willing to please, caught
under the spell of a racy American temptress,
a woman who may well have been
part of a secret Satanic cult.
Investigators began interviewing
potential witnesses.
They asked everybody from that house to come
to the police station to be questioned.
All of the Italians who lived in the
house showed up with adult advisors
parents, professors, or lawyers.
In the Italian justice system, just
like the American justice system,
any time the police
want to see you,
it's smart to lawyer up.
Raffaele Sollecito didn't think
that he had anything to lose.
All he did was help out Amanda
when she was upset and asked him
to come back to the house
and see what was going on
at her house.
Like Raffaele,
Amanda arrived without counsel.
She may have been eccentric, but
Mignini reportedly considered her
a narcissist
and a "she-devil."
Amanda even seemed to preen in front of the
police, with a few suggestive yoga stretches.
There were moments, for example, in the police
station, when they were waiting around
Amanda infamously, as was also
reported by the media, did the splits.
She may have done
other yoga moves.
But Raffaele saw Amanda
do things that he found odd.
For example, she curled up
on him like a koala bear.
Somewhere deep down,
he felt uncomfortable.
For Raffaele, things got worse
during his questioning.
The way Raffaele got himself
into the most trouble
was to underestimate the seriousness
of a murder investigation
not to understand that he had to be absolutely
crystal clear about what he'd done,
what he'd seen, where he'd been.
He couldn't remember
what had happened which evening.
He was eating dinner, he was
smoking pot, he was seeing Amanda,
and he couldn't really remember
which night was which.
So when the police asked him, he had a
tremendous difficulty remembering
did she go to work that night?
Did she not
go to work that night?
They took that statement,
got him to sign it in writing,
and then they took it back to Amanda and said,
"your boyfriend has testified against you
and said you went out."
Amanda's command of Italian was
poor, but under questioning,
the police got her to recant her original story
and say she had not been with Raffaele all night.
This interrogation went on all night long,
and she wasn't given food or water.
She wasn't allowed
to go to the bathroom.
She was told that, you know,
"imagine if you'd been there.
What would you have
heard or seen?"
And she said here's that
really famous statement
"I cover my ears.
I heard a scream.
I cover my ears."
Amanda claims she answered hypothetically,
but it was taken as gospel.
The police told me that I
knew who the murderer was.
They told me that I had to know, that I wasn't
telling them the truth, that I had amnesia,
and that I had to remember.
Incredibly, Amanda now told police that she
was in the house when the murder occurred.
Then a new suspect was implicated Amanda's
boss at the nightclub, Patrick Lumumba.
They told Amanda Knox that they had absolute
proof that she had been at the crime scene
and that she had left the apartment
and that she had met Patrick Lumumba.
They have her cellphone, and they see that
she texted Patrick Lumumba, her boss,
and said,
"I'll see you later."
They read that as
an actual appointment with him.
And that was her last text before the
phones went off on the night of the murder.
Amanda Knox did actually say that she was
there, but she said she was in the kitchen
And that she heard Patrick
murdering Meredith.
She heard Meredith scream.
But her statement is so confused
and so bizarre that she said,
"i remember confusedly
that he did all that."
And what she has said was the police
asked her to imagine various scenarios,
and that was one of them.
So they basically browbeat the confession out of
her, and the confession is a signed statement
that they wrote for her that she signed, which
says, "I see myself in the house with Lumumba,
and he's in the other room, and Meredith
I can hear her start to scream."
Though Amanda never directly
admitted to the murder
the police were quick to report
they had their killers
Amanda Knox, Raffaele Sollecito,
and Patrick Lumumba.
With Knox and Sollecito already in custody, the
police raced out to arrest Patrick Lumumba.
They drag him out of his house,
and he's thrown into prison.
He says, "no, I wasn't there.
I was in my bar, and there's somebody who
can tell you that I was there with him."
So, they went and found his alibi, and there was
a professor of French or something who says,
"yeah, I was in the bar with him
that night.
He wasn't killing anyone
at 9:00.
He was in his bar
serving me a drink."
They still
didn't let him out, though.
As the prosecutor
built his case,
the press had a field day and dug up
everything they could about the accused.
The British tabloids, from the beginning,
were, I feel, by far, the worst
because they just printed
whatever the prosecutor said,
and he was saying all these terrible
derogatory things about Amanda Knox that
and portraying her as just pure evil
as this terrible human being
who had this beautiful,
trusted roommate
and had encouraged these men
to help her kill her roommate.
I was sexually active.
I was not sexually deviant.
And because I was sexually active, that
turned in, for them, to sexual deviance.
Giuliano Mignini had
his three killers behind bars.
He would now use the press
to help prove his case.
The press in Italy
doesn't have any boundaries.
That's where the word
"paparazzi" comes from.
The Amanda Knox case
was a media juggernaut,
and once this case got going,
it had a life of its own.
We all first heard about the case
when we turned on our televisions.
"Anything after that.
My head is all confused.
The incident has left me
very confused."
And there was an American college student
in Italy being paraded on a perp walk.
And so that was absolutely a
shocking image that went viral.
If she was an ugly girl, would we
have a different feeling about her?
Let's not overlook that the real
victim in the case is Meredith Kercher
and her family
that continues to grieve.
We need to find out
what happened.
For the tabloids, however,
Meredith Kercher wasn't the story.
This was all about Amanda Knox.
In the Amanda Knox case, the
media played an enormous role.
This was a case that was front and
center in all of the Italian media,
and they looked at her
as this sex demon.
You know, here she was, an American on
their soil, committing heinous crimes.
But some were beginning to question the facts,
at least as presented by the Italian prosecutor.
In Italy, you can't just go
to the court building and say,
"may I please have all the court records
that have to do with this trial?"
The way it's done there is all the lawyers
who are involved, and sometimes the police,
hand to their favored reporters
what they want them to have.
With Amanda in deep legal trouble,
her mother arrived in Italy,
eager to change public opinion
about her daughter.
Look at you? Okay.
I mean, as an innocent person,
it's really hard for her.
But there is no evidence
of Raffaele or of Amanda
that connects them
to that crime.
'Cause she told me, you know, what had
happened to her in the interrogation.
You know, she told me, "you know,
I never confessed to anything.
They asked me to imagine possibilities,
and, you know, I've now learned
that that's a tactic
that they use."
The only thing
that they were fixating on
was the fact that I must have met
Patrick, and so I said, "Patrick."
And then they set up this entire
scenario of having met Patrick,
about having heard Meredith scream, and
I signed to it just to make it stop.
"Who do you know that's black?"
I think is what they said.
And she said, "Patrick."
She didn't say like, you keep hearing
like, "he did it.
He's the one." You know?
"Arrest that guy.
He's the murderer."
When fingerprint results came
in, the case took a new turn.
There was an African man
at the scene of the crime,
but it wasn't Patrick Lumumba.
If you're an immigrant, you have to check
in once a year with the police, I believe.
You are considered a guest.
And the fingerprints
are known to them.
They happen to be on file
in the police station.
They belong to a man named Rudy
Guede, an African immigrant's son.
Rudy Guede was a drifter,
originally from the Ivory Coast.
He partied on the periphery
of student life
and was suspected of several
recent crimes around Perugia.
Rudy Guede had a history with
knives and violence and break-ins.
He left his blood.
He left traces
all over the crime scene.
He left his feces in the toilet, and
although that degrades DNA very rapidly,
there was DNA there as well.
His blood and fingerprints are on her purse,
and there are bloody handprints and blood
down the walls of her bedroom.
And he may have been surprised.
I don't know why he left, but he
didn't complete the act of the rape.
She had a tampon in at the time,
and maybe that's why.
But Guede had left
Italy for Germany.
He admitted to a friend he had been with Meredith
that night but claimed he didn't kill her.
His connection with Amanda, Raffaele,
and Meredith was thin at best.
There's a question about whether
Amanda and Meredith knew him.
Amanda had said, "I've seen him,
but I didn't know his name."
Raffaele had never met Rudy Guede Never set
eyes on him, Didn't know anything about him.
Within days, Guede was picked
up by police in Germany.
The initial assumption when Rudy Guede was
arrested in Germany and extradited back to Italy
was it was all gonna be over
any day now.
Everything pointed to him.
He even had a motive.
He had stated in a conversation to
the police that "yes, I was there.
Yeah, I know who Amanda is,
and, no, she wasn't there.
And no, I've never met
her boyfriend before."
So we're all sitting there
going, "hallelujah."
They basically just throw
Lumumba back out on the street.
"Sorry, we got
the wrong black guy."
Patrick Lumumba was released from
custody, but the damage was done.
His reputation was trashed
because of Amanda's accusations.
I would take back
my interrogation.
When I think back on it, and
God, especially right afterwards
right after all of that happened I wished
I wished so much that I had stood up to them.
Prosecutor Mignini, however,
wasn't changing his position.
To him, Amanda had simply
confessed about the wrong man.
He still believed the murder stemmed
from a sex orgy gone wrong,
with Amanda at its center.
Investigators were interested to know how
sexually active she was, because they felt like
that fit into
the theory of their case.
They took her downstairs and had a
doctor take a blood test in the jail,
and then they called her back and said,
"we're so sorry. You have H.I.V."
So she writes down every guy she's ever
had sex with, and there's seven guys,
and then two weeks later,
they say, "oops.
Sorry.
We made a mistake.
You're not H.I.V.-positive."
But meanwhile, they've taken this
document where she's listed out
these guys that she's had sex with, and
they've handed that to their press.
To take that false information of such a deeply
personal nature, something that's so intimate,
and then leak that out to the media to add
to the sensationalism of this case
it's just unimaginable.
We have to try to do our best
We have to continue to hope.
To put on a face that it
is going to work out.
There is no case left.
And we keep telling her that We
should be looking at physical evidence.
It's taking way longer than we ever
expected, but she will get out of there.
I looked at all the evidence in the case,
including the crime-scene DVDs, her "confession,"
her bank records,
her phone bills.
I had everything
and went through all of it
and was convinced
at the end of the day
that she was innocent.
With the evidence pointing at
Rudy Guede as the lone killer,
would the prosecution actually put Amanda
Knox on trial for a murder she didn't commit?
If the Amanda Knox case would
have been tried in America,
it would have been
the Rudy Guede case, period.
DNA is very powerful evidence, but if it's
mishandled, if that evidence is compromised,
it's garbage in, garbage out.
Their investigation technique
was really just appalling.
If you ever get into the system,
it's very hard to get out.
I was not strapping on leather
and bearing a whip.
14 months have passed since
Meredith Kercher was murdered.
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito
have spent the entire time
waiting in jail
for their day in court.
For Amanda, the ordeal is compounded by
the peculiarities of the legal system.
Italian juries
work differently than ours.
The judge
is a member of the jury.
The judge actually leads the
jury in its decision-Making.
In Italy, they take their time,
and the case may start at one point,
then adjourn for a couple of weeks.
You'll have another day of
testimony, a longer adjournment.
And so this keeps people on pins
and needles for a lot longer.
Before trying Amanda and Raffaele,
the Italian court will prosecute
the third suspect in the case, Rudy Guede, who
has requested a separate, fast-track trial.
With Rudy Guede,
they had strong evidence.
They had his DNA not only on her
body, but actually inside of her.
So, this was a slam-dunk case
against Rudy Guede,
and if this case were brought to
justice in America, it's my suspicion
that we would never be hearing
about Amanda or Raffaele.
The investigation would have
begun and ended with Rudy Guede.
But there may have been other reasons
for granting Rudy Guede a quick trial.
The prosecutor was convinced that this wasn't
just Rudy That once Rudy was found guilty,
Rudy would come and cooperate, especially if he
was offered certain reductions in his sentence.
In the end, Rudy Guede's
trial was simply a warm-up.
The real show was
the prosecution of Amanda Knox.
She was voted over the First Lady of France
as most popular in the press in Europe.
Think about it Amanda Knox,
you know, over Carla Bruni.
And I think it's so unfair to look at everything
that Amanda does in court and to write it down,
but you see people
actually doing that.
When I didn't cry, it was bad.
When I smiled, it was bad.
When I didn't smile, it was bad.
It I have been paralyzed by this kind of
scrutiny, and And I feel like it's unfair.
Amanda Knox's defenders say she
was constantly misrepresented.
Even her online social-media
nickname, "Foxy Knoxy,"
was held up as alleged proof
of her wicked ways.
In court, they talked about that all the
time like, "why are you Foxy Knoxy?
What does that really mean?"
It was a name her teammates gave her
when she played middle-school soccer.
That was her nickname.
It was that innocent.
Nobody called her that
in Seattle.
Nobody called her that
when she was in Italy.
No one called her that
post-probably age 14.
At the same time, the media virtually
ignored Raffaele Sollecito.
Raffaele, in the media,
was almost invisible.
He was Amanda's boyfriend.
He was alleged to have been
involved somehow.
The prosecution made various allegations against
him, but, really, nobody focused on him.
The trial was a long, slow process, and the media
constantly milked the emotions of the public.
Prosecutor Mignini, who tells wonderful
stories, would get up and say,
"Amanda did this,
Amanda did that,"
and they would just write it down as
though it happened in front of their eyes.
The Italian justice system and the Italian
media system is like a two-headed monster,
and both of them
need to get fed.
Even with all its advantages,
the prosecution's case
lacked hard physical evidence
against Amanda and Raffaele.
They keep trying to find evidence placing
Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito
in the actual room where the murder was committed,
and they've never been able to do that.
There's only two pieces of evidence that
ever supposedly connected her to this crime,
and neither one of those
connect her.
The first was a kitchen knife
found in Raffaele's apartment.
In the case of the knife,
the media mantra on this
the thing that they kept
repeating over and over again
was that it had Meredith's DNA on the
blade and Amanda's on the handle.
It did not have
Meredith's DNA on the blade.
If a spoon was taken from your kitchen
drawer and tested by the same techniques,
that spoon would be shown to have
Meredith Kercher's DNA on it.
It really was pseudoscience.
The second piece of evidence was Meredith's
bra clasp, found at the crime scene,
allegedly carrying
Raffaele's DNA.
So, they went back in some 40-some days after
the original crime-scene investigation
and brought back that bra clasp.
They didn't collect it for,
like, six weeks,
and they kept kicking it around the room and
then picking it up with the same gloves
and putting it down.
The defense tried to challenge the DNA
tests done on the knife and the bra clip,
but the prosecution argued
that all testing
had been done correctly.
The judge agreed and
disallowed additional testing.
They refused to have independent experts
look at any of the scientific evidence,
so all you could go by was what
the police wanted to show you.
What ended up being Prosecutor Mignini's contention
was that somehow Amanda ordered the murder
from the next room, because that was the only
way you could explain how she was involved,
but there was none of her DNA
at the scene.
It was a remark that didn't
even pass the giggle test,
but that was what the prosecutor
was reduced to.
Without real evidence, the prosecution had built
a case on Amanda's presumed bad character.
But was merely looking guilty enough to
send Amanda Knox to prison for life?
For all of their theories about
my personality and my behavior,
there is nothing
that links me to this murder.
I am not present
at the crime scene.
I'm just not.
The more you know about Amanda
Knox and Raffaele Sollecito,
the less likely you are
to believe that they're guilty.
If you met Raffaele Sollecito, you'd
realize the idea of him harming a fly
is absolutely absurd.
The idea that I could have participated in a
murder and yet be not present at the crime scene
is ludicrous.
The trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele
Sollecito lasted almost 12 months.
Finally, on December 4, 2009, just over two
years after the murder of Meredith Kercher,
a verdict is reached.
Breaking news from Italy.
Amanda Knox
found guilty of murder.
The verdict for the 22-year-old American
handed down earlier this evening,
and we're told she was sobbing while
the decision was being announced.
You could really hear
a pin drop in that room
the judge dispassionately saying that both
were guilty, giving Amanda Knox 26 years,
her former lover 25 years, or the
brutal murder of Meredith Kercher.
When the verdict came down, there
were parties in the streets.
I mean, people seemed to be overjoyed
with the fact of her conviction.
As an American living in the 21st
century, being present at the conviction,
which was announced at midnight on a foggy
night with a crowd of townspeople shouting,
"assassina Americana"
Was the closest thing I will ever
come to, I think, in my life,
witnessing an actual
pagan scapegoating ritual.
The prosecution and Meredith Kercher's
family felt justice had been served.
The Kercher family is convinced
that she killed their daughter,
and they are behind
the Italian prosecutor 100%.
But there were others who were outraged by the
manipulation of evidence and the verdict.
In any legitimate court of law that
was looking at this DNA evidence
in the United States, in the U.K., in
France in any of these countries,
this DNA evidence
would be absolutely thrown out.
There's not a hair
of Amanda Knox in there.
There's not
a fiber of Amanda Knox.
There's not blood
of Amanda Knox.
There's not footprints
of Amanda Knox.
There's nothing.
No one, however,
questioned Rudy Guede's guilt.
Yet 2 1/2 weeks after Amanda's trial ended,
Guede's sentence was reduced from 30 years to 16,
leading some to ask,
"did he cut a deal?"
There was overwhelming DNA evidence along
with lots of other physical evidence
that points to Rudy Guede.
Amanda's attorneys appealed the verdict and
focused on challenging the DNA evidence.
When the appeals process began, it felt like they
had another mountain to climb, but right away,
you could tell that there
was a very different tone,
and, again, the key decision was
whether or not they would allow
an independent assessment
of the forensic evidence.
November 24, 2010.
11 months after the guilty verdict,
a second trial is granted.
The defense presented a very compelling case,
identifying Rudy Guede as the true killer,
based on hard facts and motive.
Rudy Guede came to the house.
He broke in.
He was in the bathroom, and he
left his own DNA in the bathroom.
And Meredith may have come home
and surprised him.
Maybe he was lying in wait.
I hate to say it,
but it's kind of
the garden-variety
"one guy kills, tries to
rape and rob girl" case.
In contrast to Rudy Guede's
incriminating DNA
Amanda's defense team
also set out to prove
that the DNA found on the knife, allegedly
Meredith's, did not implicate Amanda or Raffaele.
They actually had independent experts come
in, and they were absolutely appalled
by the way the DNA
was collected and tested.
Those independent experts said,
"the evidence is contaminated.
It's not admissible.
It's compromised."
What they thought was Meredith's
DNA was not DNA at all.
It was nothing.
It didn't match her
in any way, shape, or form.
The prosecutor, trying to rebut that,
suggests that somehow Amanda went back
and cleaned up the DNA.
It's a ridiculous notion.
It's crazy.
Somehow, they can have this special
vision that allows them to see DNA,
so Amanda and Raffaele were able to go
in All night long, they worked
And cleaned up only their DNA and
left Rudy's DNA all over the place.
Amanda and Raffaele tried to remain
hopeful about the second trial,
but public opinion was still against them, and
they had already spent years behind bars.
There were times when I thought
I was going crazy in prison,
and I was literally just talking to
my younger self when I was alone.
I would be alone in my cell, thinking about the
past and thinking about all of my regrets.
Publicly, this case is considered to
be the Amanda Knox case, but, really,
it's the Meredith Kercher murder case, and
sadly, I think a lot of that's been lost
in the way the case
has been covered in the media.
Millions of Italians
Believe that this young woman
is a murderess millions.
I don't think Amanda's guilty
of felony murder,
but I think Amanda is guilty
of being felony stupid.
The second trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele
Sollecito took 11 months to complete.
Even when delivered in Italian,
the verdict was clear.
Amanda Knox was free.
Knox, Amanda is free, and
Sollecito, Raffaele, as well.
In the fall of 2011, after these kids
have been in prison for four years,
a Perugia appeals court threw the case out,
overturned it, and they walked, and they went home.
While it became a time of celebration for Amanda
Knox, Raffaele Sollecito, and their families,
the tragedy of Meredith Kercher
cannot be forgotten.
The Kercher family
has paid the ultimate price.
I wish that they would not always go by what
the prosecutor says, because the prosecutor
is absolutely obsessed
with this one person,
and, actually, they could have
had some closure long ago
if he had just pursued
the most logical trail.
I don't think the prosecution has admitted that,
through the objectivity of their evidence,
they can conclude
who participated in it or not,
and the fact that it has been
put out there for so long
that I may or may not have had something
to do with a murder they can't let go of.
They just they just the idea
that someone knows what happened
or was a part of what happened
and isn't saying anything
and isn't being held responsible
is maddening.
I understand that.
But it's not
I'm not responsible
for what happened.
I didn't do it.
I wasn't there.
I don't know anything more
about it.
This is a case where there's DNA evidence
that shows that the murderer isin prison,
but yet there's this feeling that,
somehow, justice hasn't been served.
When I talk to people,
they don't understand
that somebody else has already
been convicted of this crime.
Not only that, but that all the evidence
in the murder room points to Rudy.
Just after her acquittal,
Amanda flew back to the U.S.
She knew she had to face the press,
but it was nothing like Italy.
When Amanda came home,
there was a huge crowd.
My family's the most important thing to me right
now, and I just want to go and be with them,
so thank you
for being there for me.
All the TV stations, all the radio stations, all
the print media Seattle Times, everybody
they wrote a They sent a letter which I
think is unprecedented together, saying,
"we will honor Amanda Knox's
request to leave her alone."
Raffaele Sollecito tried to
move on with his life, as well.
I think that Raffaele
feels very embittered
about the justice system
and continues to feel very embittered because
of the length of time that this has taken.
His great virtue was he understood
that Amanda was innocent,
and he was absolutely
not gonna roll over.
He was not gonna testify against
her, no matter what it cost him.
After Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito were
released, Raffaele came to the United States
and spent a few days with her.
Their relationship was over.
They're obviously bound together by this
bizarre experience that they've had,
but they are not boyfriend
and girlfriend anymore.
Some five months
after returning home,
Amanda Knox signed a book deal worth a reported
$4 million, but her nightmare was not over.
On March 26, 2013, two months before
Amanda's memoir was published,
she and Raffaele received
distressing news.
"Crime & Punishment" tonight will Amanda
Knox face retrial for murder in Italy?
The Italian Supreme Court
was considering a third trial.
Unlike the American legal system, the prosecution
in Italy can appeal a reversal verdict,
and Giuliano Mignini is apparently not
a man to lose the case of his career.
We call this
the "Mignini Express."
You know, it was like it's like this
vortex you get into, and you can't get out.
The biggest moral of the story
is she should have lawyered up,
but before that,
she should have got on a plane.
She stayed in Italy voluntarily.
If she had just flown home, none
of this would have ever happened.
Whether or not Amanda Knox returns
to Italy to face her accusers,
the Italian justice system
can grind on for decades,
and Amanda may never be able
to say she is truly free.
I'm afraid to go back there.
I don't want
to go back to prison.
There are only so many times that
I can say, "no, I didn't do it."